The killing process

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Humans enjoy eating animals and animal by-products. We downplay empathy and emphasise a more macho attitude. Perhaps we regard animals as the spoils of a war waged against them. They are trophies and celebrations of our status as the ‘dominant’ species. We eat them with almost every meal, and that ‘couldn’t-care-less’ attitude won’t change until people realise what sort of ugly system they’re buying into.

We need to remind ourselves what actually happens to the animals we are about to eat. Lobsters and crabs are boiled alive, fish are slowly suffocated or crushed under the weight of other caught fish, chickens are hung up by their legs to have their throats run though revolving blades, cattle have a bolt fired into their foreheads, pigs have electrified tongs clamped to their heads, male chicks are thrown live into mincing machines!! The way in which we kill animals is cruel by any standard and yet we humans accept it and are glad to use the ‘end-corpse’ for food. The supermarket trolley, filled with styrofoam packets of muscle tissue, animal organs and even, in the case of fish, their whole bodies, is a long way from the human-fulfilling-the-hunting-instinct. We eat animals that have been imprisoned by others and we allow others to do the killing for us. We’re not too fussy how it all happens just as long as we don’t have to know about it. If we use animals for food or clothing we comply with an industry that cares nothing about the feelings of animals. They simply coral, breed, fatten and execute animals as part of their business. 

Wild animals used for food

3.

In my local supermarket, at the meat counter, are some ‘wild’ products - notably kangaroo meat, for human consumption and for dog meat. I doubt if people really want to know what happens to these animals. These wild creatures are not farmed but shot, at night, in the glare of the hunters’ spotlights. Their young, too small to be useful, are bashed to death or left for predators. Perhaps these animals are killed to make income for the hunters but I suspect there’s some salacious pleasure derived from the brutality involved in this killing ‘sport’ itself.

Many years ago, people were far more in touch with how animal foods came to them. Long before we held ‘food animals’ captive, we hunted them for food. Back then it might have been essential for our own survival, but now it isn’t, we mostly hunt for recreation. My next door neighbor hangs his fishing rod over the sea wall to relax from his stressful job, as a chef. He’s an intelligent, kind man and probably never thinks for a moment that the fish he catches are sentient creatures who share with us very similar pain receptors and nervous system. He may not realize or want to know that the fish he hooks will slowly suffocate to death over a period of twenty or so minutes. He (like thousands of others) fishes for fun, unconcerned about how fish feel when hooked and hauled out of their world and left to die a slow death. As a chef he’s dealing with animals all the time, but his ‘working-animals’ are already dead. He doesn’t have to make any connection between the living creature and the body parts he uses. He simply cooks what his customers ask for (which is mostly meat, sea foods and rich dairy concoctions) without any thought of animals suffering or dying. 

By-products that are used for food

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Unless one can feel an empathetic connection with the dairy cow or one is politically involved with promoting Animal Rights, the use of by-products is the cut-off point. If we want to liberate animals in general (from being used for food) firstly this matter of dairy farming must be tackled. Because people have such difficulty in giving up dairy products, they won’t choose to look at the ethics of milk production, which in turn dramatically lessens the chances for Animal Rights to get a foothold. Unless the by-product and co-product boycott is widely established, no amount of meat-avoidance will ever be enough to secure freedom for farm animals. In the end it all comes down to the participation of ethically-minded people in the denouncing of the complete range of animal cruelty, not just some of it.

Milk and eggs are so familiar in almost everybody’s daily lives - along with cheese, butter, milk chocolate, yoghurt, cream and various confections. These by-products seem quite benign, as if anything so useful or so delicious could ever be thought to be tainted. Yet ethically, if not also nutritionally, these products are dangerous to both the animals who suffer as producers of them and the humans who ingest them. Certainly both milk and eggs hide behind a very ugly system of animal abuse.

Dairy products particularly are hard to ignore because they’ve insinuated themselves into so many food products. For example, if you read the ingredients label on almost any commercial cake or biscuits, you’ll see ‘milk products’ (and/or ‘egg products’) listed. In fact I once counted over two hundred supermarket food items which contained milk or egg! Most people wouldn’t be prepared to deny themselves that many tasty products on ethical grounds. In so many ways we are well enough informed but we choose to remain ignorant to avoid inconvenience. 

Animals that are used for food

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I’d like to go back to basics for the next series of blogs, to recap on some of the reasons why we shouldn’t be using animals for food. This is at the heart of veganism and the whole boycotting of any industry that uses animals for any useful purpose at all. Humans have gradually realised that animals can be profited from and that there are no constraints on exploiting them - the general public will not complain as long as the producers give them what they want. Competition for market share has led the ‘Industry’ to lay aside welfare considerations in order to produce food and clothing at the lowest price possible. Animal suffering is no longer considered. I’m mainly concentrating on the food industry here - where animals are used for food.

My reaction to this subject - animals being used for food - is to simply say it’s inhumane to keep animals, kill them, butcher their bodies and eat them! The very idea of denying animals their freedom, keeping them in slum conditions then, on their execution day, hanging them upside down to bleed to death, is obscene. But if cruel and callous things can be done to entirely innocent animals like cows, steers, pigs and sheep, how much worse it seems for the very young, the six week old pullets, piglets, calves and lambs - the children of the animal world.

            The sheer horror of what is happening on a mass scale all around the world to animals makes me (and many others like me) want to try to change peoples’ attitudes by pointing out some of the terrible things done to them both at the farm and the abattoir. Most people, however, seem reluctant to think too deeply about it - “Ho hum” they say and “All very sad, but that’s just the way things are. We humans have been eating animals for a million years. We aren’t likely to change now!!”.

But we are changing, especially here in Western nations where we are better informed about animal exploitation. We’re changing, mainly because the shame is too great to bear. In 1944 the first Vegan publication put it this way. “The great impediment to man’s moral development may be that he is a parasite on lower forms of animal life”. Since the 1940’s, when some people started to eat solely from plant-based foods - without becoming ill - there was for the first time in human history a safe way out of our dependency on animals for food. A vegan regime was shown to be nutritionally healthy. From then on, we were able to look ahead to a time when the use of animal products (such as meat, dairy, eggs, leather and wool) would be viewed as an inhumane and unsustainable practice from a much less enlightened age.

Vegetarians stop eating animals for both health and ethical reasons and certainly they make a strong statement to their meat-eating friends. But not all exploited animals are reared for meat. It’s debatable, for instance, as to which suffers most, the dairy cow or the beef steer. Each is held captive, denied any sort of natural life and ultimately ends his/her life at the abattoir. But the dairy cow suffers in so many other ways. The same comparison applies between egg-laying hens and chickens reared for meat. The milk or egg by-product-producing animals often suffer more than ‘meat’ animals.

            Once again, quoting from that first vegan publication - “Lacto-vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh eating and a truly humane, civilized diet ... we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the full journey”. Vegetarianism is often as far as many people will go, not wishing to look deeper in case they find out more than they’d bargained for. They don’t want to put milk and egg production in the same category of cruelty as they do meat. If they did, they’d logically have to become vegan. Milk, for example, is a product involving animal cruelty. It is also a dangerously misrepresented substance - promoted as a good supply of calcium whereas in reality it has the opposite effect. It leaches calcium from the bones. But milk is a problem on another level because it turns up as an ingredient in so many popular food items and for this reason it’s unlikely that users of milk will want to know the details of how it is produced for fear of their having to black-list milk products. They stick with the line that “if cows weren’t milked they’d die” (which is quite true as far as it goes) but the rest of the story they’d prefer to ignore. The biological details of milk production go something like this:

A cow’s biology determines the quantity of milk she produces and whilst it’s normally too little to be of much interest, when she’s pregnant, she makes lots of it. Once impregnated and after giving birth to a calf, her mammary glands go into over-drive. The calf, having served its main purpose in uteri, is often then regarded as a dispensable item and killed just after birth to allow the huge quantities of its mother’s milk to be diverted for human consumption. With continuous impregnation (calf bearing) subsequent loss of calves plus constant milking, she is soon exhausted and her milk yield so low that she’s no longer economically viable. She will live only ten of her normally twenty years before being sent for slaughter. That’s all the thanks she gets for producing vast quantities of milk for the farmers and their milk-drinking customers! It’s an ugly story that omnivores don’t enjoy hearing.

I suspect most so called ‘animal welfare’ organisations don’t want to hear this since it would oblige them to speak out against the egg and dairy industries. They concentrate on factory farming and meat eating, and they promote vegetarianism in order to win substantial support from the general public. They don’t dare to speak out against the broader welfare issues for fear of losing the support of milk drinkers and egg eaters and the users of the many thousands of commercial foodstuffs loaded with these products.

Getting used to non-violent ways

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I think most humans are violent. Nonsense, of course they aren’t! Media stories make us think there’s violence everywhere; they bring (what passes for) interest into our dreary lives, to give us something to talk about. So, we discuss violence. We say how we dislike it. But it sucks us in ... then we become disgusted by our own attraction to it and react against it. We swing right over to the opposite side, towards the idea of non-violence. It feels politically correct. We like to see ourselves as non-violent. But that isn’t reality, because it stops us looking for the origins and nature of violence. Is there any purpose to violence?

            In legend, the Lemurian civilisation abhorred violence, they feared it. They were incapable of dealing with it, and eventually they died out, perhaps because they tried to deny the very existence of violence. The message of such legends is that denial stops us searching for realistic alternatives. It’s as if we are only drawn to the passivity of it. We don’t see the dynamic side to non-violence.

            Today we can be dynamic about it, by boycotting violent activities that characterise present human behaviour. As consumers we can avoid using violent goods. We can encourage cruelty-free and environmentally friendly commodities. We can deal with our differences of opinion without resorting to aggression. On a personal level that’s certainly dynamic, but for it to be convincing it has to be consistent too.

            Non-violence can be in everything we do, from thinking and talking to actively supporting commercial enterprises. As more people act in this way fashion takes over, and violence and coercion literally fade away, almost without anyone noticing it’s gone.

            The transition in our society will happen, surely, when those with a strong interest in exploring non-violence are proactive, when they actively set the example, showing it where it counts, by not participating in the violation of animals but also by refraining from making value-judgements about others - resisting both temptations.   

Non-violence starts at home

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Non-violence starts at home

Non-violence is no new kid on the block. It’s as old as the hills and the very bedrock of wise philosophy. But it always steps back and allows violence to pass by, remembering that we exist in a world where violence still rules.

            Non-violence says “calm down” in the middle of a heated argument. As worthy as any ‘good idea’ might be, it doesn’t outweigh the need for good manners, so as the discussion of opposite views proceeds it doesn’t hit a brick wall. When we are disagreeing over something important, the reason we need to apply the brakes before the discussion gets emotional and personal is that we need to avoid an explosion, and then a long up-hill struggle to restore things back to balance. The non-violent ethic keeps high emotions under control. It operates on a ‘count-to-ten’ principle to defuse anger and insult. So, we don’t want a pussy-footed interaction, and we surely want to be dynamic, so I wonder how dynamic non-violence should be. Is it simply feeling fearless when engaging in robust interaction? Perhaps being brave isn’t so straightforward, because to the other side it’s how it comes across - it usually looks like a sort of  violence. And violence is surely based on fear, and in this case fear of losing the argument. Fear makes us use violent methods to get what we want. Throughout life we force things to our will. We bend the rules and promise ourselves that we’ll fix any damage later, but than we forget to do that. So violence comes to characterise us, as persons who are willing to forget to heal damage.

            Take the violent world of Nature. Forceful events like storms, epidemics and earthquakes destroy on a massive scale, but this sort of violence isn’t the same as human-instigated violence. Ours is so damaging because it lets things get worse and worse without any intervention intention to repair. Nature destroys and then repairs, it brings things back into sustainable balance.

            Human violence accumulates and corrupts everyone it draws into its thrall. It is driven by insecurity and an ambition to win, and on a collective scale it becomes war and pillage.

            By implementing the principles of non-violence we might be able to stop wanting to win. We can plug-up our violence-leaks simply by bringing in a different sort of energy, by using a different sort of fuel for a start. Namely, by changing the type of food we eat.

            A change on this sort of scale implies a long to-do list. Violence-free food isn’t necessarily always obvious or easily available. But the idea suggests changing our daily habits and that’s something many people would like to be able to do, if only to move away from the usual hard-hitting approach.

            So, I change, you change, then hopefully everyone changes on the basis that the habit of non-violence, and the promise of better things to come out of it, is infectious. The opposite (traditional violence-based foods and violent behaviour) is obviously unattractive, because it promises that nothing will change for the better.

            Violence. We see it in children, our partners, in Society itself. It occurs to me that our main job is to keep non-violent principles in touch with reality. By checking ourselves for violence and seeing how it affects our closest relationships, we can alter the way we do things. As we experiment with it we can watch this ‘new way’ grow. Vegans live a laboratory life, in their own homes, in a relatively safe environment where we can test and trial ideas alongside those we know best. If we can be a cool operator at home we’ll stand a better chance of bringing ‘that way’ more successfully into the outside world. At home we’ll possibly be praised, mocked and criticised, but at home we can feel relatively safe. The impact of any criticism on our ego is softened by the intimacy of people who know us. With those closest to us, we can work through our differences more thoroughly. Hopefully at home we can watch out for each other without losing interest in them. We can move on without leaving anyone behind. That building of mutual care is good for building up confidence, and developing enough chutzpah to go into the outside world of strangers and say “this is what I reckon”. And then to communicate the details.

A Non-Violent World

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Is a no-weapon world, where we trust our neighbour, just pie in the sky? A planet of humans - can it exist without resorting to violent confrontation? A non-violent world is something we can hardly imagine.

            It surely starts with buying cruelty-free and environmentally-friendly products, which sends a powerful message to those who produce goods. It’s the first step towards a peaceful, no-weapon world.